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Determining What Expert Piano Sight-Readers Have in Common

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Determining What Expert Piano Sight-Readers Have in Common Music Education Research ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmue20 Determining what expert piano sight-readers have in common P. Arthur , E. McPhee & D. Blom To cite this article: P. Arthur , E. McPhee & D. Blom (2020) Determining what expert piano sight-readers have in common, Music Education Research, 22:4, 447-456, DOI: 10.1080/14613808.2020.1767559 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2020.1767559 Published online: 12 Jun 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 33 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cmue20 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 2020, VOL. 22, NO. 4, 447–456 https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2020.1767559 Determining what expert piano sight-readers have in common P. Arthur a, E. McPheeb and D. Blomc aSchool of Optometry and Vision Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; bSchool of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia; cSchool of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Penrith South, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Music sight-reading is a valuable skill that eludes and frustrates many Received 2 June 2019 musicians. Techniques for teaching sight-reading are varied, with Accepted 7 May 2020 teachers mostly falling back on personal experience or simply hoping KEYWORDS that, somehow, the penny will drop for the student. This study reports Expertise; sight-reading; on a survey of the music learning and playing habits of expert and non- ‘ ’ piano; eye-movements; expert piano sight-readers. Pianists were categorised as experts pedagogy according to their ability to perfectly perform a 6th Grade AMEB (Australian Music Examinations Board) sight-reading assessment piece. This grouping was determined by the analysis of eye movement patterns as pianists performed various sight-reading tasks (Arthur 2017). The data show significant differences in musical training and performance experiences between the two groups. Introduction Defining a sight-reading pedagogy can be problematic because the skill is seldom overtly taught and the methods used are often based on intuition and personal experience (Lehmann and McArthur 2002). Compounding this, studies on sight-reading pedagogy rarely use similar strategies and fail to offer sound evidence for assisting students in their acquisition of sight-reading skills (Hodges and Nolker 2011). Also, sight-reading is generally not taught explicitly in college-level piano lessons (Kornicke 1995; Zhukov 2005). It was found that, of 73 advanced pianists, 68% reported that sight- reading was not included in their lessons (Kornicke 1995). This may be due to an assumption that sight-reading skills are innate (Kornicke 1995), or due to the time constraints of college-level piano lessons (Zhukov 2014b). However, teachers who do spend lesson time on sight-reading are more likely to be teachers of younger students. This is possibly because sight-reading is included in the curriculum of music examining organisations (Zhukov 2006), or because many popular beginning piano methods explicitly teach sight-reading skills (Dirkse 2009). In Australia, teaching sight-reading often involves asking students to play through sample sight-reading tests as set by examining bodies with the teacher identifying errors (Zhukov 2014a). However, simply practising sight-reading in this way doesn’t necessarily ensure improvement. With sight-reading expertise having been shown to be linked with significantly greater working memory capacity (WMC) (Arthur 2017; Meinz and Ham- brick 2010), there may be credibility in the view that at least some aspects of sight-reading perform- ance are innate rather than teachable. This study, therefore, reports on a survey of the music learning and playing habits of expert and non-expert piano sight-readers to determine what expert piano sight-readers have in common. CONTACT P. Arthur [email protected] © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 448 P. ARTHUR ET AL. Literature review The sight-reading pedagogy literature proposes teaching strategies that address findings of broader psychological research using typically small samples, across short timeframes, and these are very rarely replicated. In response to the apparent ‘ad hoc’ nature of sight-reading pedagogy, there has emerged a need for research to ‘focus on finding effective means of sight-reading training at all stages of learning a musical instrument’ (Zhukov 2006, 5). The paucity of research was recognised and addressed by the undertaking of a large-scale meta-analysis of existing experimental studies that used a pre-test/post-test, control-group design to determine which variables had the greatest effect on participant groups (Mishra 2014a). Pedagogical foci in areas of ‘Aural Training,’‘Controlled Reading,’ and ‘Creative Activities and ‘Singing/Solfege’ were shown to have the greatest effect on sight-reading skill. A sight-reading curriculum was developed using another three single-focus strategies to address rhythmic and pitch variables in sight-reading accuracy: rhythm training, stylistic understanding and accompanying (Zhukov 2014b). Results suggested that training in each of these areas improved sight-reading. Zhukov further built on the findings with the development of a combined approach strategy, which created a single teaching resource from the three aforementioned individual strat- egies (2014b). This hybrid curriculum significantly improved sight-reading skills in all three cat- egories relative to the results of each single-focus strategy. The efficacy of this curriculum with intermediate and beginning pianists is yet to be tested. The teaching areas found to be most likely to offer sustained improvement in sight-reading ability were: collaborative playing, rhythm training and pattern recognition training. Collaborative playing opportunities can include giving students the chance to accompany others (Wristen 2005) through live or electronic (Midi or recorded backing tracks) and ensemble performance (Kopiez and Lee 2006; Lehmann and McArthur 2002). Other researchers found a similar correlation between sight-reading proficiency and hours spent accompanying (Lehmann and McArthur 2002), another collaborative activity. It was also found that pianists who engage in collaborative performance, i.e. accompanying, are more adept sight-readers than pianists who predominantly focus on solo repertoire (Lehmann and Ericsson 1993). While such activities show positive corre- lations with sight-reading expertise, the comparisons occur over different instruments, including voice, and suffer from lack of consistency in defining expertise (Daniels 1986; Gudmundsdottir 2010; Kopiez and Lee 2008; Mishra, 2014b; Waters, Townsend, and Underwood 1998; Woody 2012). Research has suggested a correlation between rhythmic ability and sight-reading (Boyle 1970; Elliott 1982; McPherson 1994). Rhythm training has been found to positively benefit sight-reading skills (Fourie 2004; Kostka 2000; McPherson 1994) and students vocalising the rhythm while clap- ping the beat have been shown to remediate poor rhythmic sight-reading (Zhukov 2006). The ability to chunk individual rhythmic values into larger groups seems to result in greater rhythmic accuracy in sight-reading (Halsband, Binkofski, and Camp 1994; Waters, Townsend, and Underwood 1998). This may enable other features of performance, such as dynamics, to be processed more effectively (Dirkse 2009). Likewise, it has been noted that ‘when music contains predictable or straightforward patterns, a musician is more likely to look ahead and anticipate the flow of music’ (McPherson 1994, 217). Skilled sight-readers have highly-developed pattern recognition and prediction skills (Waters, Townsend, and Underwood 1998) with studies showing that pattern recognition comes from a fam- iliarity with predictable tonal patterns (MacKenzie et al. 1986), phrasing (Sloboda 1977) and chord recognition (Cox 2000). It has also been shown that performance errors increase (Alexander and Henry 2012) and expert sight-readers’ eye movements change (Arthur, Blom, and Khuu 2016) when music shifts away from easily predictable patterns. A non-expert group of piano sight-readers was found to execute more forward saccades (the movement of the eye in a forward direction to the next fixation) when compared with the expert group playing the same piece of music (Arthur 2017). This finding was unexpected and brings MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 449 into question the sight-reading teaching strategy of simply ‘looking ahead’ as one which encourages visual processing ahead of the point of performance. Encouraging such an approach for a non-expert without the requisite theoretical knowledge to facilitate ‘chunking,’ may actually be cognitively impossible and, consequently, counterproductive. As Sloboda (1985) notes, ‘It may well be that increased ability for preview is the result of some other skill, such as the ability to detect pattern or structure in the score, and that simply trying to look ahead will not improve this skill’ (68–69). This idea brings into question how expertise has traditionally been defined and whether features of musical experience might correlate with such measures. The definition of expertise has often relied on subjective ratings or self-reporting. For example, earlier studies examining sight-reading expertise used a teacher’s estimate (Halverson
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